Three Secrets To Bar Exam Success

Three Secrets To Bar Exam Success

If you are taking the bar exam, you are probably very interested in learning some secrets to bar exam success!  After all, you always want to do everything that you can to boost your chances of passing the bar exam! In this post, we let you in on three secrets to bar exam success.  Remembering these three principles while you are studying for the bar will set you up nicely to do well!

Three Secrets To Bar Exam Success

Personalized study schedule

The first secret to bar exam success is to make sure you create a study schedule that is personalized to you.  Many commercial courses will create extensive daily lists of tasks for you to do.  However, not all of these tasks are beneficial for every person.  Everyone learns differently, and thus it is important to focus on tasks that are truly helping you learn the law.  If one learning strategy isn’t working for you, stop doing it!  Don’t waste your time doing something that isn’t helping you just because a commercial course schedule tells you to.

Further, you know you best.  If your commercial course is telling you to spend three days reviewing real property the week before the bar exam but you struggle more with torts, you will be hurting yourself by strictly following your commercial course schedule.  If you know you struggle with torts, you should build a study schedule that gives you a bit more time to review this topic, and then maybe less with the subjects you excel on.

In this post, we give you some tips on how to make a bar exam study schedule.  Additionally, having a daily schedule is important in order to keep yourself on track!  Here we provide some guidance for how to create a daily bar exam study schedule.  Finally, once it gets down to the end of bar prep, make sure to revise your schedule so that you are devoting time to what you need to still learn.  In this post, we tell you how to make a study schedule for the month before the bar exam.

Devoting time to memorization

The second secret to bar exam success is that you must devote a significant amount of time to memorizing the law.  Too often we see people jump right from learning the law (i.e. attending lecture) directly into attempting practice questions.  It is very important to do a step in between – memorize the law!  Scoring well on the bar exam requires you to do three things: understand the law, memorize the law, and apply the law.  While you might understand a concept, you need to be able to efficiently recall the rule when prompted by a multiple-choice or essay question.  If you don’t have the rules memorized, this will greatly hinder your ability to answer questions both accurately and quickly enough to pass!

To put this secret to bar exam success into motion, make sure you schedule time after each lecture to work on memorizing what you learned.  You don’t have to have everything memorized on the first try!  You will need to keep returning to previous subjects each week in order to reinforce them in your memory.  Memorization is very much a work in progress!  Here are a few of our memorization blog posts, including how to memorize your bar exam outlines and bar exam memorization tips!

Perfecting your essay structure

The final secret to bar exam success is making sure you have perfected your structure on your essays.  Regardless of whether you are taking the MEE or a state-specific essay exam, there are plenty of easy points to pick up just by structuring your essay right!  Be sure to follow the IRAC format – Issue, Rule, Analysis, and Conclusion.  Your “Issue” can just be a brief heading that lets the grader know what you are about to discuss.  Then jump right into the “Rule.”  State only what you need to for this issue.  Don’t present paragraphs of background information and don’t dump all of the rules for the entire essay in one paragraph.  Focus on the rule for this issue, state it concisely, and move on.  For your “Analysis,” be sure that you are using plenty of facts from the fact pattern!  Apply the rule directly to the facts and walk the grader through the analysis.  If the rule has multiple elements, make sure to explicitly analyze all of them!  Lastly, state a clear “Conclusion,” as conclusions are worth a lot of points on the bar exam!  Then move on to the next issue and do it all over again.

To further develop this secret to bar exam success, be sure to check out this post on using IRAC on the bar exam!  You will also likely find this bar exam essay template useful

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